"In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the "harmless," if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. To portray this lengthy ideological change as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the writings of a large number of thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith."

"Aeon is an online magazine about nature, culture and ideas. We launched in London in September 2012, championing bold thinking and fine writing. Every weekday we publish a long-form essay, free to all."

"In our era of electronic communications, we’ve come to expect that important innovations will spread quickly. Plenty do: think of in-vitro fertilization, genomics, and communications technologies themselves. But there’s an equally long list of vital innovations that have failed to catch on. The puzzle is why."

"You could say that the commons constitutes the great invisible sector of the economy and human society. Or as Illich would have put it, the commons is vernacular culture at work. It’s important to stress that the commons is not a resource. It’s a resource plus a community plus that community’s particular rules and norms for managing the resource. You could say that the commons is a socio-ecological-political-cultural paradigm and worldview."

"Energy isn't just what it is. Energy is what we have decided we want it to be. Sometimes, that fact leads us to make good decisions. Sometimes, it leads us into horrible mistakes. More often, we get a little of both at the same time. But we can't plan out the future of energy without taking a good, hard look how our beliefs and cultural ideas have created its past. We have to come to terms with the fact that our decisions about energy aren't guided by pure economics or pure science, and never have been. If we ignore that, then we're doomed to keep making sloppy choices, or become frozen in a standoff of ideologies disguised as fact—and neither is something we can afford to do right now.

Human society—American society—is reflected in the infrastructures it builds, Madrigal writes. Powering the Dream is a book that makes that fact abundantly clear. "

"This phenomenon is one of the most important things you can understand about startups. You'd expect big startup ideas to be attractive, but actually they tend to repel you. And that has a bunch of consequences. It means these ideas are invisible to most people who try to think of startup ideas, because their subconscious filters them out. Even the most ambitious people are probably best off approaching them obliquely."

"Again, we don’t know for sure, but we suspect that the analogy with biological disease is badly flawed. For example, whereas it is probably true that most people are susceptible to HIV, our susceptibility to any particular idea, product, musical artists, etc. varies tremendously, depending on our tastes, backgrounds, and circumstances. Unlike for influenza, to which you’re either exposed or not exposed, even the ideas you do encounter have to compete for attention with everything else that you’re exposed to. And unlike models of disease, which assume that disease spreads exclusively from person to person, information can be disseminated by the media and advertising as well as by word of mouth.

All of these differences, along with many others, could dramatically alter the prospects for social epidemics, as well as introduce other mechanisms entirely by which social change can come about, yet models of social influence reflect very little of this added complexity"

"Adam Smith and the ‘invisible hand’ are nearly synonymous in modern economic thinking. Adam Smith is strongly associated with the invisible hand, understood as a general rule that people in realising their self-interests unintentionally benefit the public good. The attribution to Smith is challengeable. Adam Smith’s use of the metaphor was much more modest

"Think of it this way. When some folks go out of their way to show off their defiance and rebellion, others go out of their way to publicly squash such rebellion, to assert their dominance. But if you are not overtly rebellious, you can get away with a lot of abstract idea rebellion — few folks will even notice such deviations, and fewer still will care. So, ask yourself, do you want to look like a rebel, or do you want to be a rebel?"

To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started with evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to explain how such powerful biological innovations as sight and flight came into being. More recently, Steven Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From, showed that it's also applicable to science, culture, and technology. The core of the idea: People arrive at the best new ideas when they combine prior (adjacent) ideas in new ways. Most combinations fail

"The goal is not to convert people to the other side. Rather, it is to overcome the mutual bewilderment and demonization that can happen when each side hears the arguments of the other. It is to get over the kind of assumption that anyone who holds those other positions must be stupid or evil."

"Another concept that I haven’t tried yet but which seems like a natural possibility is guiding students through the preparatory work that an author or producer might do if they were adapting a body of knowledge, a setting or a story for some kind of media besides scholarly publication. Say, what kinds of researched knowledge you might need if you were going to write a script, make costumes, find locations, fine-tune dialogue, craft audio, and so on for a film working with a particular historical setting. "

"So if you want to come up with organic startup ideas, I'd encourage you to focus more on the idea part and less on the startup part. Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems like the problem is important enough to build a company on. If you keep pursuing such threads it would be hard not to end up making something of value to a lot of people, and when you do, surprise, you've got a company."

The Smart Set is an online magazine covering culture and ideas, arts and science, global and national affairs — everything from literature to shopping, medicine to sports, philosophy to food. The Smart Set strives to present big ideas on the small, the not-so-small, and the everyday.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) is an organization created to promote changes in economic theory and practice through conferences, research grants, joint ventures with academic and research institutions and other education initiatives. The Institute seeks to create an environment nourished by open discourse and empower the next generation of scholars with the necessary support to accelerate and advance new and important thinking on economic issues.

So here’s one thing I was thinking about: what intellectual issues and questions by their nature require discussion between a very heterogenous group of disciplines and intellects for innovative solutions or some kind of forward motion to emerge?

Almost any problem or question could probably benefit from having more than one perspective or angle devoted to it, but for many academic questions or policy problems, the natural range of useful contributions ought to be fairly narrow....I’m focused here just on intellectual and applied problems where heterogeneity in methods, bodies of knowledge and perspective are a requirement for progress. A few examples, and I’d be glad to hear of more along these lines: SETI, artificial intelligence, economic development, education, cultural creation

The motor of accumulation has been sputtering for nearly four decades, and its coughs can be heard again now that the roar of combusting paper wealth is dying down. This doesn’t mean capitalism or even growth is at an end. Economists of all kinds have pinned their hopes on the transformation of laboring and saving Chinese into hardy consumers. In any case, the US consumer—a ravening appetite in a paper house—appears to be finished as the world’s buyer of last resort. It would add a nice dialectical twist to the future history of our period if it could be said that, around the time the post-Maoist Chinese took up shopping, the post-bubble Americans turned to studying Marx.

The bigger point for me is that after decades in which the left has been on the defensive, it’s time for a politics of hope. We need hope to mobilise a positive alternative to the fear, anger and tribalism on offer from the right. Centrist pragmatism provides nothing to match the enthusiasm that can be driven by fear and anger, as we have seen.

We’ve had a fair bit of fun here lately, pointing out the silliness of those who are supposed to be the intellectual leaders of the right, in its libertarian, neoconservative and Republican tribalist versions. But, as quite a few commenters have pointed out (one using the same, maybe Oz-specific, phrase that occurred to me) the exercise does seem to savor a bit of flogging dead horses.

It seems to me necessary to go beyond this, which was one reason for my post on hope the other day. To make progress, we need to reassess where we stand and then think about where to go next. T

The Idea Index serves as a tool to educate, network, and help solve problems. As an educational tool, the Index is full of hopeful, exciting ideas and solutions to pressing problems. As a networking tool, the Index allows site visitors to contact the project leaders, leave a constructive and/or encouraging comment and connect with one another. It presents a fully searchable database of socially-responsible initiatives, in all stages of development, in need of further funding and support.

Although information, news, and opinions continuously circulate in the worldwide social network, the actual mechanics of how any single piece of information spreads on a global scale have been a mystery. Here, we trace such information-spreading processes at a person-by-person level using methods to reconstruct the propagation of massively circulated Internet chain letters. We find that rather than fanning out widely, reaching many people in very few steps according to “small-world” principles, the progress of these chain letters proceeds in a narrow but very deep tree-like pattern, continuing for several hundred steps. This suggests a new and more complex picture for the spread of information through a social network. We describe a probabilistic model based on network clustering and asynchronous response times that produces trees with this characteristic structure on social-network data.

Contrary to predictions that large-scale information spreads exponentially, like an explosive epidemic, the researchers found that the letter did not reach a large number of individuals in a few steps. Rather, it took hundreds of steps of people forwarding the e-mail on to reach the 20,000 who signed the found copies.

That’s why I am so enamored with the work of inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson, a sort of R. Crumb meets R. Buckminster Fuller. Johnson is a former urban planner, and his work tends toward the nodes where social issues intersect with design and urban planning issues.

In discussing his often fantastical, sometimes silly, sometimes visionary concepts, he has said, “If I could use two words to describe what it is that I enjoy it is that I love to be sneakily outrageous . . . [It may be that] I have decided an idea has no practical worth and would never be likely to be adopted seriously (like most of my ideas), but I like it anyway.”

Sometime in the next week - January 1st if you have that available, or maybe January 3rd or 4th if the weekend is more convenient - I suggest you hold a New Day, where you don't do anything old.

Don't read any book you've read before. Don't read any author you've read before. Don't visit any website you've visited before. Don't play any game you've played before. Don't listen to familiar music that you already know you'll like. If you go on a walk, walk along a new path even if you have to drive to a different part of the city for your walk. Don't go to any restaurant you've been to before, order a dish that you haven't had before. Talk to new people (even if you have to find them in an IRC channel) about something you don't spend much time discussing.

Neoclassical economics tends to downplay the importance of human institutions, seeing instead a system of flows and exchanges that are governed by an inherent equilibrium. Predicated on the belief that markets operate in a scientifically knowable fashion, it sees them as self-regulating mathematical miracles, as delicate ecosystems best left alone.

If there is a whiff of creationism around this idea, it is no accident. By the time the term “economics” first emerged, in the 1870s, it was evangelical Christianity that had done the most to spur the field on toward its pres ent scientific self-certainty.